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People are compelled to tell John Watson their deepest secrets.
When he checks out at the store, the cashier cheerfully says, “I have never been in love with my husband. Receipt’s in the bag, have a nice one!”
He turns on Baker Street and a dog walker says “I contemplate murder on such a regular basis that I’m afraid I’ll eventually commit one. Lovely day, isn’t it?”
A woman sitting next to him on the bus leans over on his way home to let him know, “I love peeing my pants. I get such enjoyment from it. This driver is being a bit speedy, huh?”
John just gives a tight smile and hopes that she doesn’t pee while they’re sharing a plastic bus bench.
The people don’t seem to know they’ve told him. Nobody has ever gasped, covered their mouth and exclaimed, “I don’t know why I said that!” Nobody around John reacts to the declarations, either. It’s like the person just communicates their dirty laundry to John and John alone.
John, by the time he’s invalided from the army, has grown used to this. For a while, in his teens, when he realized that what he was learning wasn’t normal, he wrestled with the concept. He wondered if it was an assignment from a higher power, that he was supposed to do something with all of these people’s closet skeletons.
He worried that he should be doing things about it-- he’d had a few that made him pause. “I capture animals in cages in the wood and then slice them open.” “I forced a woman to give me a blowjob at a bar.” “I don’t have emotions.”
But he never knew what to do. It’s not like he was handed this gift (or curse) with instructions. The general rule for him was to ignore the secrets he was told unless there was some way he could help directly. He couldn’t report any incriminating secrets without any evidence.
Notably, a woman in Bart’s had told him, “I’m going to kill myself tonight.” She was a nurse, a nice one, who smiled at every patient and scurried around filing reports at top speed.
John caught her eyes. “Hey, how are you?”
The nurse had smiled. “I’m great, how are you?”
John frowned at the floor. He wasn’t sure how to do this. “I’ve been feeling really… bad, lately. Depressed, actually.” He looked up at the nurse, who was looking back at him sadly. “Do you ever feel like that?”
The nurse paused, glanced at the patient who was in a coma on the bed in front of them. “I do, yeah.”
“This doesn’t normally happen to me,” John confessed. He hated to lie, but he couldn’t see another way to help her. “What do you do when you feel depressed?”
The nurse shrugged uncomfortably. “I go see a movie in the theatres, get a big thing of popcorn and just try to forget my problems for a few hours.”
John nodded, smiling hopefully at the nurse. “That sounds like a good idea, actually. There’s that new rom-com I’ve been thinking about seeing. Thank you, that really helps.”
John tried to smile with sincere gratitude at the nurse. The nurse smiled back weakly.
John let out a sigh of relief when he saw her at the other end of the hall the next week. She gave him a friendly wave.
That was a rare exception-- for the most part, John could do very little to help others with their secrets. At this point, he’d stopped trying. And yet still, everyone he met told him the thing they never told anyone else.
It was a very strange anomaly indeed when he’d met Sherlock Holmes.
“John! John Watson!”
John reluctantly turned to look at the man on the bench. After a moment it clicked, Mike Stamford. His secret, when they’d first met in college, had been that he’d been abused when he was young.
“Yeah, I know, I got fat,” Mike smiled kindly.
John was nervous as he walked into the lab. He always felt a prick of dread at meeting new people-- what if this was the one that confessed they were a serial killer?
But when John gave Sherlock his phone, all he heard was, “Afghanistan or Iraq?”
John went with him to the flat the next day, perplexed and a little alarmed.
“I asked Sherlock to make sure my husband died,” Mrs. Hudson smiled at him. “If you’ll be needing two bedrooms.”
John took this in stride, since he’d just heard Sherlock tell him the same outside.
They arrived at the crime scene.
“I hate myself so much that I have affairs with married men to get any kind of self worth,” Donovan said. “Hello, freak.”
John heard Anderson tell him that he was cheating on his wife, but he still got a dull kind of satisfaction from Sherlock repeating it. It was like Sherlock was figuring out the things that John was just being told.
“I worry I’ll never have a normal family,” the grizzly detective inspector said to John, and then to Sherlock, “Who’s this?”
It was only later, as the police force were tearing up his new flat, that it clicked for John. Sherlock hadn’t confessed a secret because he didn’t have any. Everyone knew he used to be on drugs. Angelo knew he was gay. Sherlock was open, flayed out for the world in a way that John had literally never experienced before. He was the first honest person that John had ever met.
John tried not to dwell on what that meant for Sherlock. He didn’t want to be the person who displayed every facet of themselves for the general public, the one who never kept any thought to themselves. After knowing Sherlock for only a week, it became obvious that he hid nothing because he was absolutely desperate for approval.
John watched as Sherlock said every single that crossed his mind without regard for the person receiving the information. And how he turned to John, waiting for a compliment. Sherlock was the ultimate exhibitionist.
Two months later, John set a cup of tea down at Sherlock’s elbow, and without looking up, Sherlock said, “I’m in love with you.”
John blinked. “What?”
“I said thank you,” Sherlock said, sparing him a glance up from the computer.
John had never had the urge before, but he felt a strange push to ask a question in response. “Romantically?”
To his surprise, Sherlock-- or subconscious Sherlock, replied. “Romantically, sexually, platonically, any way I can have you. I just never want you to leave my life.”
John nodded, afraid to push this new aspect of his gift any further.
It took another month before Sherlock used his skill in response. “John, are you in love with me?”
John paused from where he’d been cutting the crusts off of his sandwich. He had realized that Sherlock really only ate the crusts of toasts, so when he made a sandwich for himself, he cut off his least favorite part and gave them to Sherlock.
“I am, yeah,” John said slowly.
“I’m in love with you too,” Sherlock said, so plainly. Like nothing was a secret to him.
John smiled up at him. “I know.”